Help needed with fanart

[adone36]

I've been playing with BMT for a month now and have gotten it pretty much squared away. It's an awesome tool.

Previously, I had all my video files with "folder.jpg" or "movie name.jpg" located so that Sage picked up the cover art. When I installed BMT, I left this in place and selected to NOT have Phoenix download fanart. I used BMT for meta data and my "folder.jpg" for the cover art.

Now that I had BMT running right, I decided to enable fanart in Phoenix and skip a manual step. When new movies were added, the fanart showed up in the fanart directory, but Sage just shows a picture of a DVD disc and has all the metadata.

I notice there are multiple images in the fanart directory for each movie, both as background and poster. How do you get Sage to display these and what determines which image is used???

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by adone36

I've been playing with BMT for a month now and have gotten it pretty much squared away. It's an awesome tool.

Previously, I had all my video files with "folder.jpg" or "movie name.jpg" located so that Sage picked up the cover art. When I installed BMT, I left this in place and selected to NOT have Phoenix download fanart. I used BMT for meta data and my "folder.jpg" for the cover art.

Now that I had BMT running right, I decided to enable fanart in Phoenix and skip a manual step. When new movies were added, the fanart showed up in the fanart directory, but Sage just shows a picture of a DVD disc and has all the metadata.

I notice there are multiple images in the fanart directory for each movie, both as background and poster. How do you get Sage to display these and what determines which image is used???

I'd check out this small section in the bmt user guide on Showing Fanart in SageTV. The short answer is that SageTV, natively, does not show fanart at all, and you'll need a plugin to show the fanart. Read the section, and then jump to the link in the document to read more about which plugin you'll want to use.

[adone36]

Thanks Sean. I think I'll just use my old method. It will be less cumbersome than using a another plugin to select the art. I generally have the art when I create the file.

I have another issue I can't figure out. I never had fanart enabled previously, yet some items have fanart (TV shows mostly). This doesn't bother me. I also have many items which are incorrect and most likely come from the initial scan before I excluded the directories. Example "Laura.avi" in an excluded directory shows cover art and metadata for the classic movie "Laura". Where the cover art is, I have no idea and I don't know how to remove the erroneous data.

I'm afraid to use the GUI tools because they appear to only be global and the last time I used them it cost me hours of work. I had a video inserted as a recording in error. I went to tools in the GUI, brought it up and hit "remove from recordings". The GUI then removed ALL my TV imports. When I then hit "add to recordings", it started to add hundreds of excluded vids to my TV recordings. I had to add them back manually 1 at a time. That's when I discovered that during the process, Sage had lost recording details on all my recordings (the tuner info, channel, channel number were all gone). Subsequent new recordings have the info.

My biggest single problem still is that BMT treats "exclude" as some kind of filter rather than an actual exclude. If I want to check to see what is missing metadata, I can't because the GUI brings up hundreds of files in excluded directories.

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by adone36

Thanks Sean. I think I'll just use my old method. It will be less cumbersome than using a another plugin to select the art. I generally have the art when I create the file.

I have another issue I can't figure out. I never had fanart enabled previously, yet some items have fanart (TV shows mostly). This doesn't bother me. I also have many items which are incorrect and most likely come from the initial scan before I excluded the directories. Example "Laura.avi" in an excluded directory shows cover art and metadata for the classic movie "Laura". Where the cover art is, I have no idea and I don't know how to remove the erroneous data.

I'm afraid to use the GUI tools because they appear to only be global and the last time I used them it cost me hours of work. I had a video inserted as a recording in error. I went to tools in the GUI, brought it up and hit "remove from recordings". The GUI then removed ALL my TV imports. When I then hit "add to recordings", it started to add hundreds of excluded vids to my TV recordings. I had to add them back manually 1 at a time. That's when I discovered that during the process, Sage had lost recording details on all my recordings (the tuner info, channel, channel number were all gone). Subsequent new recordings have the info.

My biggest single problem still is that BMT treats "exclude" as some kind of filter rather than an actual exclude. If I want to check to see what is missing metadata, I can't because the GUI brings up hundreds of files in excluded directories.

I would spend some time reading the user guide, because much of what you are talking is covered there.

The Tools menu is global in nature (as documented), but the batch operations menu operates on the currenly viewed folder.

The exclude IS a filter... it's labelled as an "exclude pattern", where the pattern is a regular expression. I'm not sure what you expect it to be? (It's in the documentation as well)

And, using another plugin to show fanart is certainly not more cumbersome than manually naming a file?? If you use Bialio's plugin, then it will simply show the fanart if it's there, how is that more work than manually adding in fanart?

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by adone36

Thanks Sean. I think I'll just use my old method. It will be less cumbersome than using a another plugin to select the art. I generally have the art when I create the file.

There really is nothing cumbersome about it. Install the Phoenix FanArt for Default UI plugin, and that's it. It will then display images picked randomly from the fanart folder populated by BMT.

[adone36]

Ok, I didn't realize the plugin would choose cover art auto. I use malore menus and I only really use movie cover art and got into the folder.jpg habit. If I install the fanart plugin, what would happen to future files that have a folder.jpg or "movie name".jpg in excluded directories?

As to excludes, I constantly find metadata for excluded files (see example above). I removed hundreds of excluded files from import directories and did a rescan to clear Sage. Then I put them back, removing the .properties and default .jpg files and scanned again. Right now my cache directory contains dozens of urls pointing to files in the excluded directories.

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by adone36

Ok, I didn't realize the plugin would choose cover art auto. I use malore menus and I only really use movie cover art and got into the folder.jpg habit. If I install the fanart plugin, what would happen to future files that have a folder.jpg or "movie name".jpg in excluded directories?

As to excludes, I constantly find metadata for excluded files (see example above). I removed hundreds of excluded files from import directories and did a rescan to clear Sage. Then I put them back, removing the .properties and default .jpg files and scanned again. Right now my cache directory contains dozens of urls pointing to files in the excluded directories.

I guess, I can see the confusion there. The exclude filter is only applied to the via the automatic plugin, and it isn't applied via the web scan. I'll look into adding the exclude filter for the web ui as well.

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by adone36

Ok, I didn't realize the plugin would choose cover art auto. I use malore menus and I only really use movie cover art and got into the folder.jpg habit. If I install the fanart plugin, what would happen to future files that have a folder.jpg or "movie name".jpg in excluded directories?

I believe most, if not all, of the fanart plugins in the repository will show the fanart if it finds any in the fanart folder (most will choose a random choice from those present), and if not, it will still use the folder.jpg if present. Then, if no folder.jpg is present, it will generate a thumbnail from the video itself, and show that.

[adone36]

I've now enabled fanart d/l. It is d/l for several new additions as well as a changed movie. I used installed the biallo fanart plugin that Sean uses. The changed movie has the folder.jpg image and shows fanart above the metadata.

Also, I deleted the "movie title.jpg" and the .properties files from the root directories and lost all the metadata for a few hundred titles. I did a "touch" on all of these and upon rescan, they are not coming up. I guess I'll have to move them to a new directory, rescan, move them back, and rescan again.

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by adone36

I've now enabled fanart d/l. It is d/l for several new additions as well as a changed movie. I used installed the biallo fanart plugin that Sean uses. The changed movie has the folder.jpg image and shows fanart above the metadata.

Also, I deleted the "movie title.jpg" and the .properties files from the root directories and lost all the metadata for a few hundred titles. I did a "touch" on all of these and upon rescan, they are not coming up. I guess I'll have to move them to a new directory, rescan, move them back, and rescan again.

Or, you can scan them from the web ui. Just check off the option to overwrite metadata. (See the user guide for more information on browsing and scanning from the web ui)

[adone36]

That brings up the problem with the "excludes". It would be perfect if you could hit "missing metadata", but when I do that I get hundreds of excludes. You also get tv shows. It would be perfect if you could select either movies or tv and not have excludes.

I haven't tried it yet, but I was thinking of bringing up "video imports", selecting the directory with dvds and updating, but I believe there is a thread here where someone mentions you cannot drill down in the gui to a directory.

As an aside, I have a thread here where I mentioned the gui was painfully slow for videos on remote machines, while local tv files updated instantly etc. Well, since I enabled fanart, movies on the remote now update instantly. Something must go off into limbo and timeout with fanart disabled.

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by adone36

That brings up the problem with the "excludes". It would be perfect if you could hit "missing metadata", but when I do that I get hundreds of excludes. You also get tv shows. It would be perfect if you could select either movies or tv and not have excludes.

There is an open issue about this, hopefully, I'll get time someday to implement this.

I haven't tried it yet, but I was thinking of bringing up "video imports", selecting the directory with dvds and updating, but I believe there is a thread here where someone mentions you cannot drill down in the gui to a directory.

You could, until the last build, do this. This is bug and it will be fixed in newer build (hopefully not too long).

As an aside, I have a thread here where I mentioned the gui was painfully slow for videos on remote machines, while local tv files updated instantly etc. Well, since I enabled fanart, movies on the remote now update instantly. Something must go off into limbo and timeout with fanart disabled.

Not sure about that, since I've never experienced that myself.

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by adone36

As an aside, I have a thread here where I mentioned the gui was painfully slow for videos on remote machines, while local tv files updated instantly etc. Well, since I enabled fanart, movies on the remote now update instantly. Something must go off into limbo and timeout with fanart disabled.

The slowdown is most likely sage generating a thumbnail for the images (which it doesn't have to do with fanart enabled).